Solving today’s challenges in deltas around the world has become increasingly complex due to many sectors and stakeholders involved, climate change and competing demands from society, nature, and businesses. Therefore, re-designing deltas requires an integrative form of strategic planning and design, which combines systems thinking with multi-stakeholder approach. This is to support the development of integrated, future-oriented, and resilient delta regions. 

Date: January 10, 2024 | 16:00 - 17:00 (CET)

Join our expert speakers from academia and the industry sector, who will discuss and debate on the usefulness of interdisciplinary systems approaches and building-with-nature solutions, as well as how to deal with the role of multiple stakeholders in re-designing deltas, using examples from different deltas in the world.

Registration is now closed.

Moderator and Host:

Dr. Leon Hermans. Associate professor water policy at Delft University of Technology and IHE Delft. Leon’s research focuses on monitoring, evaluation and learning to support adaptive delta management and water-related transformations to sustainability. His longer-standing interest is in the use of actor and strategy models for water governance and strategic delta planning. Leon is (co-)leading projects on transformative and adaptive planning in the water sector, nature-based solutions, evaluation of water partnerships, and water allocation and rights. 

Together with colleagues from TU Delft and IHE Delft, Leon has also developed an online programme on Water Strategy and Planning along many other courses on policy analysis in multi-actor systems.

Speakers:

Dr. Ho Long Phi. Senior Consultant and Vice-Managing Director enCity. Previously founding director of the Center of Water Management and Climate Change (WACC) at Ho Chi Minh City National University, Deputy Head of Ho Chi Minh City’s Steering Committee of Flood Control, and a member of the National Advisory Panel on Climate Change. Dr. Phi is a frequent speaker at international conferences on flood management and climate resilience. He has been featured in newspapers around the world such as The Economist, The Guardian, and South China Morning Post. 

Dr. Phi will talk about the stakeholder dynamics that are especially important for long term strategic plan/policy like climate change or delta plans. Dr. Phi earlier developed the MOTA framework (Motivation – Ability), as a methodology that complements conventional performance-oriented approaches to assess plan implementation maturity and social adaptability from technical, financial, social, and institutional perspectives. MOTA framework has now been adopted by experts in various countries for strategic planning and policy uptake.

Dr. Floortje d’Hont. Floortje is a policy analyst, particularly interested in the role of systems thinking for generating innovative and creative solutions for wicked problems. In her PhD research 'Co-design in the coastal context', she sought ways to elicit and utilize specialized expert knowledge across disciplinary boundaries. She investigated how collaborative design can contribute to finding creative solutions that support flood safety, spatial quality and other community interests. Systems thinking, participatory methods, transdisciplinary, and policy analysis were key in this research.

Floortje will talk about systems thinking for redesigning deltas, using material from the recent book “Complex Coastal Systems: Transdisciplinary learning on international case studies” that she recently edited together with Jill Slinger and Susan Taljaard. 

Floortje teaches courses on system dynamics, complex system design, and has co-developed a MOOC on river basin management and design in the Netherlands: Room for the Rivers: Perspectives on River Basin Management.